That's a real man bites dog headline, I know, but Sessions has decided to get particularly nasty over an utterly irrelevant issue in the Sotomayor nomination. He's demanded decades worth of paperwork from a Puerto Rican civil rights organization. Sotomayor once served on the board for the group, Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. Sessions has demanded reams of documents from the organization...
Gus has up a typically thoughtful post about patriotism. The right wing has worked v hard for over thirty years to claim patriotism as their own and to brand liberals as unpatriotic. Well, fuck that shit. Born deep in America's heartland in the middle of the baby boom, I grew up loving the ideals espoused in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. I grew up on stories of how my dad walked,...
Liberal groups, such as MoveOn and SEIU, and liberal bloggers (such as Jane Hamsher and our own Joe Sudbay ) have been pressuring Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu to support the public option in health care reform (i.e., some kind of public health insurance plan). Landrieu has been adamantly opposed to anything resembling a public option. So groups like MoveOn have been running ads against her. Well,...
Analysis It has never been easy to sue government officials for actions they take in wartime, and such challenges, when allowed, fail more often than not. One of the main problems has been that most of the information that is crucial to the case is in the goverment’s hands, and it is seldom eager to provide it [...]
"By the time this administration is over, I think you guys will have pretty good feelings about the Obama administration." - President Obama, 6/29/09, speaking to carefully selected gay leaders at the White House A possible hate crime killing of a gay US sailor on Obama's watch. Navy Seaman August Provost III was gagged, bound by the hands and feet, shot in the head three times, and then...
We send you the complete text of this circa-1595 comedy by Shakespeare, here, on one page. The play was first performed before Queen Elizabeth, at her Court in 1597. Read it this long weekend when it's quiet. Maybe after the...
This post is explicitly partisan-political, so I know it may be violating our motto. Last August, I wrote a couple of posts arguing that The West Wing had broadly predicted the rough political, personal, and ideological outlines of both halves of the presidential tickets for both major parties, including Republican VP candidate (social conservative small-state governor included to appeal to an unenthusiastic...
On electronic discovery issues we tend to focus on the early stages – identification and preservation. But what happens at the end of the process? After all, the purpose of electronic discovery is to help the parties settle their case and ultimately prepare for trial. When cases do get to that stage, and the [...]
Upon Randy Barnett's astute suggestion, I celebrated the Fourth of July this morning by reading Frederick Douglass's famed Independence Day oration from 1852, which was titled "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?". The speech is remarkable for...
From the TaxProf Blog vault: a July 4th post by Neil Buchanan (George Washington) during a guest blogging stint here: I thought I would take another look at our oft-mentioned and seldom-read Declaration of Independence to see what it has to say about taxes and other issues of import. Herewith,...
-- to the United States, only 233 years old. I was listening to the reading of the Declaration of Independence on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday, and these words struck me: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all...
The distinguished English philosopher wrote in many areas, both historical and contemporary, but may have been best-known for his work on Wittgenstein. An evocative obituary is here. UPDATE: Another here.
Mark Sargent, Dean at Villanova for 27 years, announced his resignation on Monday, effective immediately, for "personal and medical reasons." Yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer reports: Police investigating a prostitution ring in Chester County relied on two customers, including the dean of Villanova Law School, to provide information that culminated last week...
From the press release: Stories of court-ordered child abuse inspire unanimous support After 17 months of delays and procedural hurdles, California's Joint Legislative Audit Committee (JLAC) yesterday unanimously passed a request by Senator Mark Leno and numerous co-authors to audit the California Family Court system with respect to the use...
Prithviraj will be playing the lead role in 'I Have a Dream' : I Have a Dream Movie review 'I Have A Dream' is the world famous name given to the most famous public speech by Martin Luther King, Jr.,on August 28, 1963. The speech reflected his desire for a future where blacks and whites, among others, would coexist harmoniously as equals. He delivered the speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.It
The Rev. Al Sharpton was still not satisfied Tuesday after New York Post owner Rupert Murdoch issued an unprecedented personal apology over a controversial cartoon that was branded racist. Standing on the steps of City Hall, flanked by several City Council members and civil rights leaders, Sharpton continued his calls for a boycott over the illustration, which critics say compared President Obama to